Keeping the Car Safe This Flu Season

Despite being nearly Christmas it’s also the time of year when flu and colds spread. But maybe the clues to why you start sneezing or coming down with a fever are closer than you thought. They might well be found in your vehicle.

It’s recommended that you empty your garbage frequently this time of year to remove all used tissues so no flu or cold germs spread easily. Given the smallness of the space though, if your passenger has the flu, chances are you will come down with it as well.

It’s also mold season and the presence of molds can make the place seem stuffy. symptoms are exacerbated by the air conditioning so it may be better to open a window for short sprints to air out your car. Molds also collect as a film on the inside of your window which can make it difficult to get the inside of your windshield to clear up. We recommend making your own solution of rubbing alcohol and vinegar (equal parts) to clean your window with. This will often kill the scum that normal cleaners seem to miss.

Once you start to take an interest in your car as regards germs and viruses it may be that you will never stop! After all, there’s no one time fix for the problem. A regular disinfecting shampoo of car seats and carpets is recommended. For the health of those in the vehicle replacing air filters will make the experience much more pleasant.

Something we might also do more at this time of year is eat in cars, may also cause problems. With 70% of drivers admitting to eating something in a car it seems shocking that we don’t consider how unhealthy an environment it is. It seems that we don’t care about our cars in the way we should.

It should come as no surprise that the worse place for germs in a car is a trunk’s carpet or liner. 300 to 400 germs were found in each square inch. Most of it comes from dead skin cells from humans or animals. Unsurprisingly, given the amount of garden rubbish that is transported by cars, there were traces of fecal matter found in some trunks.

Many scientists believe that cars should be disinfected or deep cleaned to get rid of germs. Certainly keeping hand wipes in your car and using them regularly will help.

The worse culprits could possibly not be privately-owned cars at all, but the taxis and the Ubers. Measuring the amount of germs that formed colonies or Colony Forming Units, a study in South Florida found that a ride-hailed car had on average 6 million CFUs per square inch whilst rentals had 2 million CFUs per square inch. Taxis did the best though, with just more than 270,000 CFUs per square inch.

It seems nowhere is safe, your car keys, the upholstery of the carpet, the door handle, the steering wheel, the gear stick, the window button and so on. It might give you a complex thinking of the places that germs might hide, though it’s hard to reach a conclusion to the problem beyond just being paranoid about where the germs might hide.